Vans Club de France Fly In 12/13/14 June St Brieuc

Friday 12^th June brought a low cloud ceiling and poor visibility and so it was decided to put on hold our flight to the Annual Vans Club de France Fly-in until Saturday which was forecast to improve. On Saturday morning Rob Gibby, Karen and Hugh together with Malcolm as safety pilot departed for France via Jersey to enable Rob get some extra experience with foreign travel formalities. Martin Stevens was accompanied by Bryn Jones in his RV7, whilst Alan Ridgeway navigated for me in my RV7A. With the Manorbier range inactive we routed direct to Berry Head VOR (BHD), then on to Skerry (50north) and direct to LFRT St Brieuc. London Information opened our flight plan for us and handed us over to Exeter and Jersey Zone gave us our Special VFR  entry at 5000’. I asked Jersey Zone for the actual weather at our destination which was broken at 2500’ and they handed us over to Rennes before we called St Brieuc for airfield information. Joining a long right base for 27 we landed and were marshalled to our respective overnight parking and given a warm welcome by the marshals.

. After having carried out the signing in formalities we were directed to the far side of the hanger for a three course lunch and some French wine kindly donated by Martin. We were joined shortly by Garry Walters and Phil Brown who had flown in from Swansea in their RV9a and that seemed to satisfy the appetites of everyone including our very own Dr Morgan (CAA aviation Licence fame! ).  Our hosts had a continuous shuttle bus service laid on to our overnight hotel where we were to have a Banquet and prize giving later that evening, but before that we had some important business to attend to. A wine tasting had been organised for us at a local super market and after sampling several of their wines it was back to the hotel for a quick freshen up and down to the bar. Pre-dinner drinks were followed by a very nice dinner and some speeches. At the raffle draw most found themselves in possession of prizes that had been kindly donated by the Vans factory and Avery tools, the main supplier of specialist aircraft building tools for the Rv family of aircraft. Everybody seemed to enjoy themselves that evening.

The next morning after breakfast a gathering of pilots outside the hotel were all pooling over their respective laptops and phones trying to obtain some sign of improvement in the weather both in France and back home but the local weather seemed to just get worse. As the mini bus turned up to take us to the airport  not much more than 2 mile up the road, the overcast gave way to some broken blue sky that seemed to improve all the way to the airfield at 500’ agl. I think that the lower level of the hotel had attracted the sea fog. After studying the updated and improved weather we filed our flight plan and started to make our way home following our outbound track and the weather on our return trip turned out to be far better. 

Report by John Fisher